With the new season of So You Think You Can Dance airing, I’ve noticed a distinct rise in tweets, comments and questions about how one might get into dancing. There’s just something inspirational about seeing masters at their craft, and the romance of a Waltz, passion of a Tango, and sheer enjoyment of a Lindy can be overwhelming. In short, it sparks a little bit of wonder and a wish to learn to do it ourselves.

As someone who’s started to dance late in life and has been doing it for a few years now, I figured I’d offer a few pointers on how to make that wish a reality.

More blog neglect, but this time I actually have some interesting things to report.

First of all, in an effort to deal with blog neglect I’ve shifted my usual authoring time to before work rather than after. Afterwards there are simply too many distractions- mental, physical and… ahem… social for me to really get focused on my thoughts and get them down. Whether I can keep it up is anyone’s guess, but for now I’ve got a nice cool morning, a full battery and a patch of sunshine to write in. What else could you want?

This week I made cheese. This is otherwise not something of particular importance that needs to be reported, however it was one of the longest/oldest things on my todo list, and the fact that I’ve actually done it means that I’ve made a significant dent in all the things on that list. Baby steps in reclaiming my free time, as it were, and I’m starting to feel a little more liberated in that regard.

I ran five miles yesterday. This is taking some time to sink in, and I still don’t quite believe it myself. It’s certainly an accomplishment for someone who came from the world of morbid obesity, and I am having a hard time not being smug at everyone I know.

Of course there are some caveats- I scaled my speed down to a 10 minute mile with ten second negative splits on the mile, so other than the distance increase I wasn’t really pushing myself. Even so it feels like a significant accomplishment not only because it’s the longest I’ve ever run in my entire life, but because I’ve also managed to break past the 3.1 mile mental barrier that comes with training for a much shorter race.

What really struck me about the whole experience is how easy it was to go the extra mile(s). Once I’d gotten up to speed and convinced my body it wasn’t stopping anytime soon, it was just a matter of keeping my mind occupied while my feet did all the work. My iPod really helped with that, but I’m told the bigger races don’t allow headphones. I can already imagining myself stopping after the 3rd mile because I got bored and saw something shiny lying in the road.

Fall San Francisco trip is starting to take shape. Looks like it’s cheaper to fly into SF rather than Reno, and go hit the JMT from there. I won’t really have any time to visit people, as I’ll rapidly disappear into uncharted (sortof) wilderness. And when I come back I’ll be more interested in soaking up hot springs than driving back to SF to meet peeps.

So, yesterday started off with a comment in my inbox from Terri and a reciprocate post of hers in her own LJ that totally started the day off right. The side effect of this is that I now feel like I should post more… though I really don’t know what to post about. I mean… apparently I “relieve creative urges”. Seems almost like I’m a rather drastic medieval solution to relieve biliouos humor or something like that, kept on the shelf in the supermarket right next to the discount thumb screws and the Heinz Brand Boiling Oil (”Now with guaranteed flaying!”).

So, I was at a friend’s birthday barcrawl this last weekend, starting at the Tiki lounge. Throughout the evening I kept encountering women on the dancefloor who… for some reason believed that dancing is jiggling back and forth from one leg to the other while holding a beer and doing the exact same high-pitched ‘woo’ over and over again, and whose idea of a good conversation was talking about how they think their outfit is really cute or how their nails happened to match the color of my shirt.

I fear for the human race. What does it take to find someone with a bloody brain? An Opinion? The ability to construct an argument? Instead of this consumerist fad-driven shallowness that’s trying to copy the personality of what happens to be on this weeks’ Maxim?

It’s spring. I can tell because my body refuses to get more than 5 hours of sleep, and I can’t help bouncing regardless of how sick I’ve been. I have energy again.

Tonight, on… well, more than a whim, I managed to psyche myself up sufficiently to break the initial social barrier that always comes with going to a new club/restaurant/whatever. In this case, it was the weekly Swing Dance night at the Wightman School, highlighted today by the Boilermaker Jazz Band. Now, I know no swing- or rather, I only know the basic steps, in theory, much like a tender highschool me knew how sex worked, in theory. Lots of hype, no actual skill or experience. So with more than a little apprehension I showed up for the free Jitterbug lesson at 8PM.

Recently, I’ve been idly contemplating the nature of my posts here. They all tend to go into the hugely introspective. My trip to Maine, for instance, was more about self discovery than the actual event, and pretty much everything else follows that vein. Other posts are recipes, lists, and other things of varying noise-to-content ratio, and I start to wonder if somewhere I’m losing something important. No matter. C’est la vie. After all, this is my journal, and reading back a few years I can still get that jolt of memory. What I write here are keys to remembrance just like pictures, and since I live the majority of my life in my own brain (my imagination rules), it’s likely just the way I happen to explore things.